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I invited myself to Mara Welton’s New North End kitchen to learn fresh ways to use the annual August cornucopia of tomatoes and zucchini.

She gave me a lesson as well in putting a home-cooked, from-scratch garden meal on the table in under an hour (homemade tortillas included) even after a long day of farming.

Welton greeted me with the flashing smile familiar to farmers market customers of Half Pint Farm, the three-acre garden she and her husband, Spencer, cultivate in the Burlington Intervale.

“I’ve got to make a fresh salsa first – we just got home and Spencer’s hungry,” she said, leading me into the tiny kitchen of the couple’s mid-20th century ranch house in Burlington.

It was dinnertime on the cusp of August, just as Vermont fields begin to pour forth their bounty.

It was quickly clear that Welton’s kitchen was the place to be. Tomatoes and zucchini were scattered across the small counter. Pinto beans from last year’s garden cooked on the stove. A bag of roasted chile peppers, tucked into the freezer last autumn, sat thawing.

Through an archway, two foot-high words hung on the dining room wall: “farm” and “eat.”

“Cooking is the other part of why I farm,” Welton said. “They go hand in hand for me.” Indeed, when she is not planting, watering, weeding and harvesting, she is the enthusiastic Vermont leader – and New England regional governor – of Slow Food, the international “eco-gastronomic” movement dedicated to the pleasures of local, sustainably grown food.

Her knife flashed as she roughly chopped three heirloom tomatoes (red Eli and Aunt Ruby’s German Green). A minced jalapeno followed, and two cloves of garlic diced and mashed with salt. Done. It was the simplest of dishes, depending for its flavor on the quality of the tomatoes and the little kick of hot pepper.

Welton seized a bag of tortilla chips and delivered chips and dip to her husband (although in less exigent circumstances she would let the salsa season for 10 minutes to allow the flavors to meld).

The taste of home

As we cooked, and in later conversations, Welton rattled off a dozen ways of using tomatoes and zucchini, from simple grilled zucchini to complex tomato terrines.

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But the plan for this particular midweek dinner was a simple one: a Southwestern zucchini-based stew called calabacitas, served with grated cheese, pinto beans, the fresh tomato salsa and tortillas right off the griddle.

“For me, calabacitas tastes like home,” she said as we began assembling the stew. She pulled an Anaheim chile from the bag. The combination of roasting then freezing had loosened the pepper’s papery skin so it slipped off easily.

As we skinned half a dozen peppers, Welton explained the origins of her love of food and farming.

Now 38, she was born Mara Sandoval in Denver, daughter of an Hispanic father and a Norwegian-French-Polish mother.

“There were strong culinary traditions on both sides,” she said. “Everybody cooked and we always had gardens. … We had lots of spicy beans and we had lots of cardamom-scented Scandinavian baking.”

Each year, the family made a pilgrimage to a farm in southwestern Colorado to pick bushels of the mild Anaheim chiles and short, fat spicy chiles the family called gorditas. Back home, “there would be a giant family chile roasting party on the outdoor grill, then we would pack them in bags and freeze them,” she said.

This evening, there are a couple of gorditas in the freezer bag, grown in Vermont from her grandmother’s seeds. Welton chops all the peeled peppers, then uses her hands to mix them with minced garlic and salt.

“This is the green chile relish you always have in the refrigerator,” she said. “If you have eggs, you have to have green chiles. If you are having a hamburger, you have to have green chiles. If you are eating potato, you have to have green chiles.”

She holds the bowl up for me to sniff. “It smells like home,” she says.

Calabacitas originally was made with immature calabaza, a tropical gourd native to the Americas, Welton said. She uses zucchini instead.

“This was a standard dish in my family,” she said. “I’ve been eating it since I was born.”

Welton is a dark-haired woman with the muscular vigor of a farmer and the softly sculpted curves of someone who loves good food. Her movements around the kitchen — the flashing knife, the rolling of tortillas — were entirely smooth, as automatic as and un-self-conscious as tying one’s shoes.

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She chopped a handful of bacon slices and put them in a frying pan. While the bacon browned, she mixed tortilla dough: two cups of flour, two teaspoons of baking powder, ¼ teaspoon of salt and two tablespoons of oil, worked together briefly before she added ¾ cup of water. She kneaded the dough briefly and set it aside to rest for 10 minutes.

She sliced three zucchinis the long way, into quarters, then chopped them into half-inch triangular slices.

While the bacon cooked, she recalled her route from Denver to a farm in Burlington. She started as a pre-med major in college while Spencer – the two have been together since high school – majored in classics. Neither was satisfied. A professor suggested Spencer work on a nearby farm, and Mara soon joined him.

“We realized, ‘Oh my God, to have the best food, you have to grow it yourself,” she said.

And that is what they did, first as backyard gardeners during a Peace Corps stint in the Solomon Islands, then in Pennsylvania, where Spencer studied agro-ecology, and finally in Burlington.

They discovered the city when Spencer attended an environmental conference here in 2002. Mara came along. By the time the conference was over, she had explored the Intervale, picked up an application to farm there and rented an apartment.

Half Pint Farm opened the next year on a single acre. From the start, they specialized in niche products – unusual and heirloom varieties, baby vegetables and hard-to-find items like squash blossoms. Half Pint became known for its jewel-like displays and, among cooks, for the recipes Mara Welton shares on the farm’s blog.

Peasant fare, rich flavor

Meanwhile, in the kitchen, Welton scooped the crisped bacon bits out of the pan. She dropped the zucchini slices into the hot bacon fat.

This is the secret of coaxing flavor out of zucchini, she said: “You have to brown it.” Cooking over high heat drives some of the water out of the vegetable, concentrates its flavor and adds the sweetness of caramelization.

Once the zucchini browned, Welton added the bacon, green chile relish, a cup of frozen corn kernels and a little water to the pan. While the stew cooked gently, she pulled golf-ball-sized chunks off her tortilla dough and quickly rolled each into a circle, using the short, cut-off end of a shovel handle as a rolling pin.

Each tortilla puffed slightly as she cooked it on a hot griddle. Onto the dining room table went the zucchini stew, a bowl of pinto beans, the stack of warm tortillas and the cool, spicy salsa.

Dinner was served. The zucchini had taken on a deep, nutty flavor complemented by the crunch of corn and the layered flavor of green chiles. The beans provided a meaty background. The tomatoes in the uncooked salsa were fresh and bright.

This was hearty peasant fare, timeless and yet perfect for this summer moment.

Mara Welton smiled as we sat down to a table of food she had grown, harvested and cooked.